Hepburn Gifts Limited
Introduction
Hepburn Gifts Limited is a manufaturing company that produces gifts to specialty shops. Some items that Hepburn makes are in steady demand while others are fad items with very limited lives. Part of the company's strategy to stay competitive is to introduce innovative products on a regular basis. For instance, the company is currently considering about introducing a new product: ZEN Rock Garden, a version of the Sand Boxes. The product data such as marketing data and material requirements are already collected by the supporting staff. The management should consider them carefully to plan production strategies since wrong interpretations may lead to lower income and possibly loss of market share.
SWOT analysis
Strength: Hepburn’s main strength lies on its ability to create innovative ideas and implement them in a timely manner. The potential products are first introduced to the CEO during the monthly management meetings, during which the new product is selected (out of the potential ones). Then, the supporting staff can collect marketing and procurement data that will allow the managers to further assess the product’s profitability as well as developing future production plans. Finally, the company’s business relationship with retailers will successfully enable the product to be released into the national market, such that Hepburn remains competitive in the industry and even gain higher market shares.
Weakness: The company has some proportion of the fad products which have very limited life, thus it forces the company to timely introduce the new products in order to survive. However, the introduction of the new products will increase the expense of the company and requires extra training and working hours of the labor, making the whole operational system become more complicated. In addition, it seems like that the company is in a shortage of labors and labor efficiency according to our calculation, since the...
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